Dan Fesperman’s ‘The Letter Writer,’ and More

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CreditChristoph Niemann

By Marilyn Stasio

April 29, 2016

War makes patriots of us all — even Mafia capos. Albert Anastasia, a big deal in Murder Inc., enlisted in the Army. Joseph (Socks) Lanza, who controlled the rackets at the Fulton Fish Market, let naval officers work undercover on his fleet. And Long Island mobsters were said to have helped capture saboteurs who came ashore from a German submarine. These and other real-life gangsters appear in THE LETTER WRITER (Knopf, $26.95), Dan Fesperman’s dynamic novel set in New York during World War II.

One of these superpatriots was Meyer Lansky, who arranged for Mafia dons to coordinate their war efforts with Frank Hogan, the New York district attorney, and Charles (Red) Haffenden, from Naval Intelligence. This irregular alliance provides a learning experience for Fesperman’s fictional sleuth, Detective Sergeant Woodrow Cain, a transplant from rural North Carolina. On his first day on the job, he’s assigned to fish a murder victim out of the Hudson River, the ninth floater that week and one of some 700 a year. What better introduction could the city offer?

Seeing New York through Cain’s eyes gives us a bracing new perspective as his efforts to identify the corpse take him from the German enclave of Yorkville in Upper Manhattan to the tenements of the Lower East Side, where a mysterious man called Maximilian Danziger performs a unique service. Old and frail but vibrantly alive in Fesperman’s penetrating portrait, Danziger charges a modest fee to write letters for illiterate clients frantic for news of their relatives back in Eastern Europe. “He’s the last link to everything they’ve left behind,” a friend says. “Their families. Their pasts. If he disappears, so will all of that.”

Fesperman’s prose is almost photographic, creating vignettes saturated with color and humming with life. It puts us on the scene at Longchamps, where dapper mobsters dine in style; then down on the Bowery, where hard-luck cases live in sad hotels like the Sunshine; then on to the morning bustle of the markets, where the city greets the dawn.

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It’s a sign of big trouble in Christopher Charles’s mystery THE EXILED (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) when Wes Raney, the only homicide detective for miles in this part of New Mexico, drives onto Jack Wilkins’s 1,000-acre spread and finds a cattle ranch with no cattle, but a Jaguar in the garage. The three corpses (one of them Wilkins’s) in an underground bunker tell an ugly story of murder and vengeance. But it’s the theft of 10 kilos of cocaine that puts Raney in mind of what he came west to forget — his history as an undercover New York narcotics cop who succumbed to the lethal product. Not that he stands a prayer of losing his former identity: “He’d been out west almost two decades and still the locals knew at a glance.”

There’s no doubt that Charles, a pen name of Chris Narozny, can write. (Ordered to humiliate an opponent in the boxing ring, Raney aims to “make him look as threatening as a middle-aged man staring out the window of a commuter train.”) But with a split-focus narrative and two time frames, the haunted-hero theme wears thin — twice.

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Where are the punks of yesteryear? “I’m . . . one of those living fossils you read about who usually show up, dead, in a place you’ve never heard of,” says Cass Neary, a photographer who admits to “substance abuse issues” if not a full-blown death wish. Elizabeth Hand’s HARD LIGHT (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur, $25.99) finds her antiheroine warily approaching customs and immigration at Heathrow after flying out of Reykjavik on a fake Swedish passport to avoid being charged as an accessory to murder.

Cass’s erstwhile lover, Quinn O’Boyle, has also fled the country, and has arranged for her to contact him at a bar in Brixton. A couple of bars later, she finally finds her connection — but no Quinn — in Camden Town, “where punk had gone to die its slow death.” Somehow she hooks up with a gifted (and doomed) singer improbably named Krishna Morgenthal, who introduces her to some rich old hippies at the center of a drug-fueled party scene. There’s intelligence and style, if not much shape, to the plot, which concerns stolen artifacts being traded on the black market. But Cass’s voice, as deep as a dungeon and as dark as a grave, is addictive.

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Although plenty of children run around in crime fiction, it’s not as often that you see older teenagers like 18-year-old Tessa Lowell, the narrator of Kara Thomas’s THE DARKEST CORNERS (Delacorte, $17.99), a novel written for young adults that has the crossover appeal of a conventional mystery. After a long absence, Tessa returns to Fayette, Pa., to see her dying father, only to learn that she and her best friend, Callie, identified an innocent man as the killer known as the Ohio River Monster back when they were 8 years old. Yet nothing about the investigation into a fresh murder is as interesting as Tessa and Callie, who consider themselves grown-ups but keep regressing into childish ways. Their excruciating self-consciousness is a clear giveaway, as are their on-again-off-again friendships and their preference for texting. “I don’t understand why society still insists on voice calls when everyone hates them,” Tessa complains. And I don’t understand why more mainstream crime writers aren’t making use of this fascinating age group.